ABSTRACT
The circumstances of Heliodorus’s late classical era and Greene’s early modern London appear radically different, and of course the innovations of print that meant so much to Greene have no clear parallel in the Second Sophistic. Devaluing Greene has encouraged modern readers to disregard the Elizabethan Heliodoranists other than Sidney. Without an approach that is both historicized and generically informed, Elizabethan popular fiction has eluded modern criticism. Part of the problem is making sense of the repeated claims the Elizabethan Heliodoranists make for readerly pleasure, a suspect term both for sixteenth-century humanists and modernist critics. While the vernacular romances that emerged in the “twelfth-century Renaissance” remained popular, chivalric fictions became problematic for Elizabethan writers in early modern England. Elizabethan romance becomes legible to modern readers when we distinguish with some degree of precision between competitive elements within the history of distinct romance forms.
